Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Written by Jean-Luc Godard
1967 | 87 minutes | French
Criterion DVD

Marina Vlady, Roger Montsoret, Anny Duperey, Juliet Berto, Claude Miller, Jean Narboni, Joseph Gehrard, Christophe Bourseiller, Marie Bourseiller, Raoul Lévy, Jean-Pierre Laverne, Blandine Jeanson, Jean-Luc Godard

What it’s about: The film eschews any kind of traditional narrative structure and defies easy summary, but loosely follows a day in the life of Juliette (Vlady), a Parisian wife, mother, and sex worker, and the people in her orbit as they grapple with the complexities of modern life.

Reflections: At some point in this brief but slightly overwhelming mixture of comedy, drama, documentary and experimentation, the phrase “drowning in reality” is used, and it seems as close to an overarching description of this movie as is possible. Part of the thrill of Godard’s films, particularly during this period, is the sheer brazenness in ignoring any kind of rules of classical filmmaking: rather than acting out a plot, the characters—including the director himself, as a whispering narrator—speak in semi-improvised treatises, directly addressing the camera as much as each other. This is a movie very much aware, not only of its own artifice—the opening moments introduce the actress Marina Vlady before overlapping her with the character she plays—but of the general difficulty in ascribing any kind of meaning to an existence constrained by language, image, commerce and capital, media, intellectual pretension, and political concerns. It makes heavy use of quotations and intertextuality, of brand names and logos, and of the urbanized, segmented landscape of apartment blocks, shopping centers, beauty salons, and cafés that envelops its inhabitants.

What saves it from being a purely intellect-driven exercise is the force and style of its presentation. The visual image is crammed full of eye-popping colors and patterns, with impossibly beautiful people, with an intense and seemingly instinctual sense of composition (the swirling mass of bubbles in a cup of coffee in a famous shot, or a car neatly slotting itself against a background of construction). Mirrors, machinery, intertitles, magazine layouts, foliage, anonymous crowds, lingering close-ups of unreadable expressions, and a thousand other details—insignificant and insufficient on their own—stack on top of each other into a suffocating hum of information, forcing the audience to grasp for coherence as the sketches of characters struggle to differentiate and define themselves amidst the energy and noise.

In case that description didn’t make it obvious, this is a movie that’s easy to bounce off of, an unapologetically arthouse “attempt at a film” (in the director’s own words). But with a little patience, it also forces one to confront seemingly obvious assumptions: why are things defined the way they are? Does the self exist outside of its relationship to its environment? Is true intimacy even possible in a world where every experience and impulse is neatly delineated and heavily commodified? Can something like a movie represent “real life” in any kind of meaningful way? What are we all even doing here? More than half a century later, its postmodern critique feels all the more relevant in a world where we are surveilled, marketed to, separated into demographics and collections of traits and behaviors in increasingly frightening and exploitative ways. And yet, I’m struck by how little pessimism I’m left feeling at the end of it—perhaps it’s always been this way and it’s just easier to notice as time and technology march forward, but nonetheless, we persist.